14 – You can see magic?

Melina joined the two waiting adventurers, arriving like a storm cloud on a clear day. Hers, as far as days went, was not a good day. From the outside she looked like she was walking slowly and looking around as if to admire the beauty of the forest, but inside she was livid: it was clear by simply looking at her that she was doing her best to ignore her own thoughts, but she was having a hard time with it.

“What quest are we doing, then?” She asked.

She didn’t even say hi.

“Ah, I uh…” Ishrin took out the envelope from my inventory. It was the same one he took the other day at the guild, the one with the poem.

“A poem? How cryptic.” She smiled.

He inhaled. “I know how it looks. In my defense, all the good ones were taken. There was a frenzy at the guild.”

Her smile deepened, turning from a fake smile into a real one. “Ah, yes. A little parting gift for our new Guild Master Syrma. He will have to sort out a few of the promotions I handed out to our most… distinguished adventurers before he can open the town to new arrivals. That should buy us time.”

“Is it going to get that bad?” Ishrin asked.

Lisette, sitting at the fire, shrugged.

“Just more of the usual, you know?” Melina replied. “Nothing too bad for us, honestly. But it’s going to get bad for the weaker adventurers. So, what does the quest say?”

Ishrin took out the envelope and gave it to her. In his mind, he tried do decide if Melina really did not care about the Guild situation or if she was faking it. Perhaps, he concluded, she was faking it just as much for his and Lisette’s sake as she was trying to fake it for herself. Fake it until it becomes true. She read through the poem and then gave the parchment to Lisette.

 

The glade was still in the morning air,

And the owl and the dove rested at peace

For the ring of light watched the heir

His son and his niece

 

Whomst among your own

Who went far and wide

Can find the lost spawn

And bring them back to light?

 

“It’s like a riddle.” Ishrin said. “Do you like these kinds of quests, perchance?”

“I despise them.” Lisette said.

“Me too. I usually like riddles but this? This is just not fun, you know? It’s too generic.”

Ishrin smiled. “So, you won’t get angry if I cheat a little with a ritual.”

“No.” Lisette said immediately.

“Of course not. In fact, please do it for our sanity.”

“Oh, I always planned to cheat, but then you smiled, and I thought…”

Melina shook her head. “It was a fake smile, you dummy. Nobody likes riddles if they are hard! And they are useless if they are easy!”

He began to prepare for another ritual, feeling good for having made the gloomy fox smile a bit. Liù fluttered around, playing with them, but Melina didn’t give her much attention because this time she decided to look closely at what Ishrin was doing, beginning from his strange spatial power that allowed him to store items without apparently any limit. He took out a large cauldron, the rift expanding to let the voluminous items out of its internal space and placed it on the fire. It was already full of water somehow, she noticed. Then he nodded and Liù flew at the bottom of the cauldron and stepped in the fire, putting her hands against the metal of the container, which rapidly turned red. The water quickly began to boil.

Melina was not surprised that the Pixie was not hurt by the fire, but she was very interested in how she communicated with her master. By what she knew, Ishrin couldn’t have had the pixie for more than a week, and even then… the guild incident with Goddard told her that she was freer to do whatever she wanted than summons usually were. So how was she doing exactly what he needed her to do without any verbal command? Did she know the ritual already? Was it so obvious that she needed to heat the water?

Her curiosity only increased with time. Melina knew very well that these were no easy feats, rituals. In her long years as an adventurer, she had never seen a master ritualist and this face told her all she needed to know about how difficult this field of magic was. How difficult to make it useful enough for an adventurer at the very least. She had no doubts that, secluded in some lonely tower, there was at least one mage completely devoted to the study of rituals in this world.

“How do you know so many rituals?” Melina asked.

“I spent my entire life studying them, creating them, mastering the art.” Ishrin said. He took out a small metallic needle and a cork. It was like a wine bottle cork, she noticed, and she thought she could still read the name of the maker on its side as it floated on the water. “I have a very good memory when it comes to rituals,” he added. “This one was among the very first I developed, back when I wasn’t very powerful. I never liked wasting time in my youth, and even when I became immortal the thought of wasting time always left a sour taste in my mouth. I know I said I became lazy, but that was a choice.” He said.

She narrowed her eyes at the explanation, not entirely sold on the latter part about laziness. She had been alive a long time too, and she knew that the laziness that comes with a changed perspective is not something you can easily control. It’s not even real laziness, is it? It’s more like… time feels different. Even a simple ‘wait a moment’ could become weeks just because those weeks feel like a moment to you now. She remembered that story about an immortal vampire keeping a grudge for ten years just because someone sold her bad apples. Adventurers had it a bit different because the constant danger they were exposed to kept them grounded. She only began to feel the effects of her ‘old age’ when she took a sabbatical.

“It’s a simple ritual.” Ishrin said.

“Simple, yeah. I can see it doesn’t have too many strange steps involved.” Melina said.

“However, the workings of the magic involved here are deeper than you’d think.”

Melina nodded. For however simple the ritual looked on the outside, she had not the slightest idea how it was supposed to work or even what it was supposed to do.

“Can you please take a step back? Your magic field is a bit…”

Her fox ears stood up. “You can see my magic field?” She cut him off. “How? What?”

He looked at her, then at Lisette. “I can see everybody’s magic fields.”

You are reading story Isekai of the Ultimate Ritualist at novel35.com

This was insane. This couldn’t be true, Melina thought. How could he say this as if it was normal? Did he have any idea? Of course not. He didn’t know. She had heard of people with special skills that allowed them to see information about the world, to know certain secrets they weren’t supposed to know, and to see things for what they were rather than how they looked. But they were all… special.

Ishrin was special too, she supposed. Did he actually have such an ability, or was it a ritual? Did he have the rarest gift of them all, maybe, an Appraisal skill? Or more still, did he have the legendary System, the ability of the Heroes, famed and feared in the whole world?

She just stared at him with her mouth open, her mind spinning with countless possibilities. Beside her, she noticed Lisette completely unfazed, as if this was just perfectly normal to her, and asked her why she wasn’t shocked at the revelation. The fellow adventurer just shrugged.

“He is very powerful.” She said.

He was supposedly only Tier 11, that’s what Lisette herself said. Melina was tier 13!

“Is it that strange?” Ishrin asked. He was about done with the ritual, only needing to add the last few touches before he was ready to perform.

“Almost nobody has that ability, Ishrin. It’s… it’s incredibly powerful.”

“I agree.” He said, taking out the envelope with the quest and looking at it for a moment. “It is very useful.”

“No, not useful.” She said. “Powerful. It’s…”

He tossed the thing in the fire, and it burst into flames. The flames exploded upwards, engulfing the cauldron and the water, sending out a shockwave of heat and compressed air towards the three. Lisette, who was the farthest from the cauldron, had to brace herself and grit her teeth as the pain and heat hit her in the face. Melina, three full tiers above her, a thousand times more resistant than her, flinched. Ishrin, standing right next to the source of the blast, was unfazed.

“Look!” he said after the fire subsided.

The needle floating on the surface of the water was now pointing somewhere, deep in the forest, slightly to the side of the still smoking mountain that contained the spatial rift leading to the unexplored realm that had opened there. Ishrin plucked the needle out of the water and handed it to Melina. She took it.

It was a whole cylinder of water, held in shape by unseen forces, with the needle floating on the surface, held in the center. She tried to turn around, but the needle kept pointing at the forest slightly off from where the smoking mountain was, like a compass.

She wanted to ask so many questions.

“Let’s go!” Ishrin said.

Lisette led the way, now holding the needle in her hands like it was the most fragile and precious of things she had ever had the honor to touch. Melina watched the rear, making sure nobody or no monster could jump them from behind. Ishrin just walked without a care in the world, looking at the trees and the crystal formations, the rocks and the scenery in general with his little pixie. She was even more captivated by the environment than he was. However, Melina could tell that he was not being airheaded. He truly didn’t see any danger in not paying attention, as if he knew very well that nothing was going to surprise him here.

“Is it your magic vision?” She asked him.

“Huh?”

“Is that why you aren’t even close to alert? You can see the monsters before they come close, can’t you? How big is a magic field?”

He smiled at the barrage of questions, and this made her feel like a small child peppering their teacher with silly questions. She felt like a freshman at the academy again.

“Want to know how big yours is?”

She looked into those dark eyes, smiling at her, and nodded.

“It’s hard to tell, really. Fields are… well. Let’s just say that they might as well be infinitely big. All of them. They have a source, and they are the strongest around that source, that little point in space-time. Then they fade with distance, following a certain law I discovered long ago. I never truly had the chance to test my theory but I suspect they go on forever, ever weaker. The Technocrat would call them Central Potential Quasi-Electroweak Point Fields. I always laughed at the names he came up with and yet… here I am using them all the same.” He laughed. “I can tell that it’s you from around 500 meters away, any father and it becomes too weak. Now, at that distance I don’t really know exactly where you are, but since the field is a sphere, I can more or less tell where the center is. Your field is green, by the way. Very peculiar color.”

She stopped walking. She needed time to process this.

“The field is very thin at that distance, of course. I’d say that at your tier your field is strongest in a sphere around 1.3 meters wide. Wanna see for yourself?” He added.

“Yes.” She blurted out.

He looked around for a moment, then took off his helmet. She gingerly took it in her hands and put in on her head, still dazed by the information he had given her. She wore it without almost thinking about what she was doing, and immediately her mind was assaulted from all directions by a bombardment of information, data, images, feelings, smells, visions…

She felt her head swim.

In the distance she could hear voices, feeling like they were submerge underwater and soooo far away.

“What color is mine?” Someone asked.

“Black!” Came the response.

Then suddenly the ground was in her face, she had fallen to her knees without even realizing it, the sensations of the wet earth on her fingers far and remote amidst the chaos and cacophony of the world. She clutched her head in pain, unable to move. She tried to block it all off, but she couldn’t. She felt liquid begin to wet her face under her nose. She felt—

The world shrunk. The silence was all encompassing. Ishrin removed the helmet from her head and put it back on, but Melina stayed there, on the ground, clutching her head in a fetal position without moving.

He towered over her, his face in a frozen scream of horror and regret, but when he looked at her his expression became of worry and care. He immediately began to apply something to her chest, she couldn’t tell, but she vividly remembered looking at him while she wore the helmet and seeing it. His field, the swirling magic around him and his clothes. His sword. He had a magical sword.

“Will she be okay?” Lisette asked.

Ishrin scratched his chin. “Yes. Of course. She needs a moment. Can you clear those trees, please?”

Lisette nodded, and the two trees Ishrin was pointing at exploded in a shower of shrapnel and splintered bark.

Meanwhile Liù tried to nuzzle Melina’s face.

Lisette flattened the terrain with her twin blades, extracting them from the scabbards fastened to her back with one fluid motion and putting them back there before an eye could even blink. She wondered for a moment how slow her movements must appear to him.

Ishrin carried Melina to the center of the clearing Lisette had created and drew a small shape with green dust on her forehead. Then he snapped his fingers.

“SHIT!” Melina screamed. He caught her.

“Shhh, shhh. It’s okay.” He said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think it would overwhelm you like this…”